


Haunting my Footsteps

by orphan_account



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen, Horror AU, Modern AU, Storybrooke, Storybrooke AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-12 02:03:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1180603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is a devil. She is, well, what he wants. (so she runs.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I.

No one is allowed outdoors once night descends upon Storybrooke.

In the day, it’s normal – there’s nothing unusual about it – but at night, after the sun has gown down, and its light has finally left the sky – the town  _changes_.

It goes silent; it goes sullen – because they are  _haunted_. Haunted by something sinister, something cruel ( _a devil roams the streets at night_.)

People lock the doors, wherever they are. They lock their windows, close their blinds and shutters – they lock up tight, and continue with their lives indoors. After decades worth of hellish nights, this town is used to it. It’s not every night that they should do this – but experience tells them that they always,  _always_  lock up.

Even if somehow, they know the coast is clear.

At night, there’s always something in the air – a thinness of it, that warns that you that something’s coming. It’s a warning sign – it makes you short of breath, but it sure as hell gives you a feeling that something’s  _arrived_.

Not for the first time, and not for the last, either.

Sometimes, the occasional, brave soul will peak around the blinds of their window and peer out from a darkened room, and look down upon the street below them.

Chances are, they’re going to see someone strolling below them, with his hands shoved in his pockets, going at a leisurely place. The streets are cold, silent, and empty – all except for him. Chances are, they might see him pause, turn, and wink up at you – before continuing on his way.

It’s his way of  _daring_  you to come outside and play.

Everyone’s known for nearly a century, that if you go outside, you might not come back. A few times, bodies of the unfortunate have been found in middle of the roads or on doorsteps or by local stores. Bodies that have been cut open, bodies that are drenched in blood, with death hanging over them like a cloud that will soon turn into a stench.

Sometimes, a lucky few will be left gasping, as the sun rises. Their rib might have punctured their lungs, or they might be so internally damaged that their pulmonary system isn’t working right. But he always leaves behind bruises – usually broken bones – and almost _always_  blood.

He is a devil-boy. No one really knows where he came from, or where he goes when he’s not stalking the streets of Storybrooke. Nobody’s quite sure what he is – only that he is Peter Pan, that he  _craves_ violence – and that life and death, of the people of this town – and, maybe, others – are a game to him.

He craves violence – he is malicious, he plays games with the lives of townsfolk – and there’s really nothing to be done about it. So the town doesn’t really have a choice – all they can do is batten down the hatches, hold their breath – or pretend he isn’t there – and wait till the first light of morning.

Wendy Darling has heard about him –  _the Pan_  – her entire life. Everyone has, but unlike most folk in the town, she’s never seen the devil-boy before. Tales from when she was a little girl – the ones your parents might have told you because they thought they were doing right by you – still haunt her during the night. She’s always been warned away from the window, always told to put her hands over her ears if she hears screaming. Mother and Father, John and Michael – they’ve told her time and time again ( _because she’s the dear Wendy Darling_ ) that she doesn’t need to see him, see any of it – not till morning.

She obeys, without questioning why. When she hears someone screaming, calling for help –  _pleading_  for someone to save them, to _help_  them – she puts her hands over her ears, and tries not to cry into the pillow. Everyone else plays music in their rooms, they turn on a fan – to cover up the noise – because Mayor Regina Mills has declared, time after time, that those who come out to help – they suffer  _worse_ than those who weren’t even supposed to be outside in the  _first_  place.

The ones who try to help  _always_  end up dead, so the ones who are trapped outside (there’s not letting them in once they’re out; the Pan will take it as in invitation, and step inside one’s household), usually know better than to call for help. They scream, they cry, they beg for mercy – or they shout, they fight back with what dwindling strength they can – but they usually don’t call out for help.

They know their fates too well.

Even if there are survivors, you can never know. You can never know if you’ll be spared, or if your neck will be snapped – as easily as a thin little twig in the fingers of Peter Pan.

As desensitized as everyone is – as  _she_  is – she still fights the childish, _foolish_  urge to peak through the blinds of her second-story window, and peer down into the street – just to  _see_  – because she has always been scared of what lurks in the alleys and strolls down the streets during (a bit more than) half a month. She’s a coward, perhaps – but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to see for herself.

Tink – one of the only adults Wendy’s ever been comfortable talking with – is a survivor. She’s one of the few – that hadn’t screamed, hadn’t become a sniveling mess on the ground, waiting for death – and that’s why she still lived, with scars from a jagged, cruel-looking dagger dug into her skin. Apparently Pan had admired that – that she’d been willing to go without a fight, but not without  _quite_  giving up. So he’d left her, left her with a near-fatal wound in the street, just before dawn, with a soft warning whispered to her before he’d walked away, and out of sight. (He’d told her he’d come back and pluck the bones from her body if he ever saw her again outside.)

She’s a kind woman, who hails from New Zealand. Young, and cynical – but one of Wendy’s only friends. Tink reminds her, time and time again, that she shouldn’t be so foolishly curious – that she’s just going to provoke him, or make him stick around longer – and she knows Wendy couldn’t live with the guilt if it meant that her catching his attention caused someone’s death (no one has died in two years – which is a record for the town, and it’s all thanks to Sheriff Emma Swan, bless her heart) – so she reminds her, time and time again.

But Wendy grows curious, as she grows older. And on the nights the air is full, and easy to breathe in – when her lungs can take in as much as she needs – she lingers outside, either linking arms with Tink or walking Ariel, another nice young lady – who, despite the town’s dark history, remained a kind and hopeful woman – home. Her eyes always dart the shadowy corners, the dark alleys, the empty streets – just to see if he’s _there_.

By the time she’s a teenager, she’s got a sensible head between her shoulder-blades– though her curiosity is still there. It lingers under her skin, like an itch she sometimes can’t scratch away, and she only gets it when the air starts growing thin around mid-afternoon – maybe three weeks since Peter Pan has been gone, has left them alone, giving them a false sense of peace, that they take whenever they can get it – and she tries  _so, so_ hard to try and ignore it.

It’s late one night, one cold, damp night – with air thin and fresh from rainfall that had subsided before the sun had decided to set. It’s a Sunday night, and everyone’s inside. It’s only been one week – one week worth of freedom from the menace that stalks their streets. Earlier today, Emma Swan had warned the towns people, in a meeting, that the Pan was getting more volatile. He was banging on more doors, tapping on more windows – tauntingly calling out to those who watched from behind their blinds. Telling them they ought to come out and play.

Emma had said, earlier that day, that under  _no_  circumstance were they to go outside. He is a monster, after all ( _devil-boy, that he is_ ) – and no matter what he says, no one should go out and meet him – speak to him – or have any sort of contact him.

No one wants to be the one who encouraged his harassing the townspeople when they actually stayed inside their  _homes_.

Wendy remembers Emma’s stony gaze, as her eyes had swept over the crowd, before dismissing the townsfolk. Everyone had left, and had gone about their lives – till the sun had begun to set, and then they had all started locking up.

(It’s December, so they haven’t much time these days.)

Wendy feels something in the air shift, something so subtle, so slight, that someone not native to Storybrooke would have missed it completely. But she knows what it is – she’s known since she was a little girl – and she feels her heart begin to pound a little bit faster as she slides the sheets over her head, hearing it beat loudly in her ears. She’s trying to quell that little spark of curiosity – that will be satisfied with a glimpse of the face of the Pan, and then she can go back to being afraid, under her blankets – and keeping telling herself that she’s _safe_  inside.

(Truth is, none of them are. He lets them think so, though. It’s so much more  _fun_  that way.)

Wendy tries her best to curl up into a ball and keep her eyes squeezed shut, to do as she does most nights that Pan is here – but if she sees him, just this  _once_ , that’ll be all she needs – and no one will be none the wiser – and peaking won’t hurt, will it?

(Wendy knows that it might make things worse, but all she wants to do is to take a  _peak_  – and if he’s not there, well – then that’s too bad for her, right?)

Wendy slowly slides the covers off her head, with clammy hands. She pushes her hair behind her ears as she sits up, slowly, knowing that this is a bad idea – it’s a  _terrible_  one – and Tink will have her head if she finds out – but she has to  _see_.

Wendy slings her legs over the edge of her bed, her bare feet dangling above the hardwood floor. She waits, for a moment – letting her mind go blank, letting fear seize her heart for a brief moment – before she decides to satisfy her curiosity, slowly puts her feet on the floor, and begins to creep towards her window.

The sleeveless white dress sticks to her clammy skin, the one that hangs below her knees (she had nightmares  _again_ ), and her hands shake as she lets her knees fall soundlessly onto the floor. Carefully, slowly – painfully so – she pries apart a blind with her fingers, her heart in her throat, with her body ready to cringe away if the blind snaps back at her, in retaliation for her disturbing it (for doing such a  _foolish_  thing).

Her eyes focus on what’s in the street below her. Her nose brushes the cool material as her eyes search the road, the sidewalks – but everything is dark, silent, and still.

She waits, with her breath held tightly in her chest, with her lungs screaming at her to  _breathe_ , and, as minutes begin to tick by, slowly, she begins to feel the small candle-flame of her curiosity begin to fade – and as the half-moon comes out from behind the clouds, some undetermined amount of time later, the small flame has been snuffed out – for good.

Wendy sighs – in relief – and is about to creep back into her bed, when her eye catches a small, almost-barely-noticeable movement out the corner of her eye. Her breath catches in her throat as she turns her head, just so – so she can see whatever it is that’s moving out there, outside.

A figure emerges from the shadows of an alley, and her heart stutters – chokes –  _stops_  – as her eyes focus on the face of the monster that’s been plaguing her town for an unnatural long time – for longer than she’s been  _alive_.

His face his caught in the moonlight, and he stands still, turned towards it. She expected something gruesome, something four – perhaps a massively hideous orc from  _Lord of the Rings_ , or something out of a horror film – but he looks to be just a boy, maybe only a few years older than her, at the very most. He wears odd clothes – green, from what she can tell – but what makes her blood run cold is the sheath that carries the obvious outline of a dagger inside of it.

Wendy can’t help it.

_She squeaks._

Fearing he’d somehow heard her ( _foolish, foolish girl_ ), she ducks under the sill of the window, clutching at her chest, eyes wide.

She waits, for several, long moments, before sitting up, and looking through the blinds.

He has begun walking down her street.

Wendy claps a hand over her mouth, just in case she screams, as her eyes are unable to do anything but lock onto the lithe figure moving in and out of the shadows as easily a feline would balance on a beam. Her left hand fists the fabric of her nightgown, near the hem. Her hands have become clammy, and the one over her mouth easily slides over her skin, but she keeps it there. Because if she doesn’t, she just might _scream_.

He’s passing her, at a leisurely pace, and she knows that, by now, she should tear herself away from the window and return to bed, because, it’s what Tink would want her to do, if she knew what she was doing. She actually half-expects her to call her, right this instant, on her mobile phone sitting idly on her bedside table, and demand that she get herself back in her bed before she risks her very life to march across town and tuck her in by force, if need be.

He’s passed her building – her family lives above the store furniture store, easily, since the store below is so big – and she’s about to let loose a sigh of relief when he halts, out of nowhere, and she sees his body go stiff like a board. She feels her throat close as he just stands there, stiller than a statue –

_Till he looks right at her_.

It’s only a swivel of his head, and there’s a quirked eyebrow as his gaze meets hers, through the blinds, but it’s enough to make a tiny little squeak bubble past her lips. She ducks down, and curls into herself on the floor, panic thrumming through her veins like a poison.

She wonders if John, Michael, Mother, or Father heard her. She’s almost certain that  _he_  heard her, down there – and – and it was like he’d  _known_ , she was right there – and so she waits, and waits, for however long it takes for her heart to stop feeling like it’s trying to rip apart her ribs and burst out through her chest, regardless of the mess it’d make.

When nothing happens, she begins to think that she’s safe – until she hears something hit her window. Her eyes go wide, and she clutches at her dress, and bites her lower lip, even as it bleeds, to keep herself from crying out.

( _She shouldn’t have looked, she shouldn’t have looked – foolish, foolish girl_.)

Another something hits her window, and she squeezes her eyes shut – praying and hoping to a God she doesn’t believe in that he’ll get bored (the tales she still hears tell her he’s a  _boyish_  creature) with her lack of reaction (that he knows of), but then she hears it  _again_ , and she isn’t able to sit idle any longer – so she peaks through the blinds, and lets out a squeak when a rock hits the thick glass of her window, right in front of her nose, and she  _hears_  his laugh ricochet across and off the empty streets at her reaction. She feels a bit of anger rise up in her, but it’s quelled when he holds up his arms to her, fingers outstretched, and shouts up at her window, “won’t you come down and  _play_?”

His face is alight with a smirk that threatens to split it, and the way he tilts his head at her makes her heart leap into her throat, and she has to clap both hands over mouth to keep from screaming. She’s beginning to wonder, in the back of her mind, if she’s at the age where heart attacks are possible (her mind and body, everything feels so  _out of control_ ).

Wendy ducks down again, and doesn’t look out the window again.

It takes a good hour until Wendy Darling is able to pull herself, with limbs shaking, light-headed, to her feet, and back into her bed. She makes sure she pulls the covers over her head and tries  _so, so_  hard to calm herself down.

(She doesn’t sleep a wink.)

When Wendy rises in the morning, at the usual time, hoping no one will notice how sluggish her movements are, and how bone-dead  _tired_  she is. She ambles to the kitchen, wondering if she’d only been dreaming – dreaming of a devil with a boy’s face – but when she goes to get her tea, she finds that her brothers, mother and father aren’t there, like they usually are.

Her brow furrows as she glances out the window – to the street below – and she sees them, still in their sleep-wear, and something inside of her lurches – _do they know? Do they know what she’s done? Do they know?_ – as she rushes down the stairs, ignoring the goose-flesh rippling across her arms as she rushes out the front door of the furniture shop, with bare feet and arms, trying to wish away the cold of morning as her she asks what’s happened.

John looks close to being sick, and Michael looks like he was roused from his sleep about half an hour too early. Her mother is shaking her head, and her father points. Wendy looks, and feels her stomach lurch under her skin.

There, under her window, against the front window, is a message, written in red. It makes her skin prickle – it’s like something’s slithering around her bones, bringing to her an ominous, dreadful feeling that makes her wish she couldn’t feel – and she wonders if it’s blood (it has to be).

Wendy feels the color drain from her face as her brain recites the message, over and over, and she feels someone pulling her away, telling her it’s okay, that everything’s okay – but her mind is reeling, and she’s not quite sure what to do – if she should tell them what she did – that he’d thrown rocks at her window last night – that the message on the wall is intended for her – but she only chokes on bile rising in the back of her throat as her mind plays the message over in her mind on a loop.

_“You should come out and play with me next time.”_

People react to the message – as if it’s meant for all of them – and Wendy doesn’t end up telling anyone, not right away, anyway. She’s uneasy, when Regina gets everyone to be quiet, so Emma and Graham can do a headcount – to make sure that everyone’s still alive – but since there had been no bodies of any kind to be found (he likes to leave them where everyone sees them, she remembers Henry telling her one day, when she was smaller, and he was naught but eight) everyone is convinced that Pan is just trying to get a rise out of them.

She lets them think that, as they all depart from the meeting, and go about their day, as they normally would – devil or no devil – and Wendy tries her best to act like it’s nothing, because it’s not exactly new of him, of the monster with a young boy’s face (it’s rumored that he stole it from another – but more believe that it’s simply a mask that’s stitched to whatever consuming, dark abyss writhes underneath his skin with flimsy, crimson-soaked thread) but it is new, that he would target someone individually – someone he’s never encountered – someone who’s not a survivor, like Tink.

_Tink_.

Tink knows something is wrong. She might be the only one who notices Wendy’s jerky movements, at times, when she is too uncharacteristically startled by something small, but she doesn’t ask about it – not until Wendy has to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from shrieking out in surprise when Gretel comes up behind her in order to ask her if she’ll help her and Hansel with a project for school.

Tink’s eyes narrow, as Wendy stammers out a reply “when – when is it due? – oh, I can help you – tomorrow, then, in the theatre? I – I can do that –”, and when Gretel leaves, satisfied, but also a bit miffed by the eldest Darling child’s odd behavior, Tink drags Wendy around a corner, and into an alley.

“What did you  _do_?”

Tink’s voice is low, but it’s not accusatory. It’s full of pity – full of a dread Wendy’s been trying to shove down into her deepest, darkest depths, but with not success – and Wendy only shakes her head.

But Tink knows better.

“You saw him, didn’t you.” It’s not a question, and Wendy can’t look the New Zealander in the eye, for the life of her.

“Promise me you won’t do it again,” Tink demands, and she’s suddenly shaking Wendy, her face close to hers – and Wendy feels something inside of her break, knowing that she will have no control over it – if he comes and speaks to the glass of her window. “Wendy, promise me you’ll hide – do whatever it takes for him not to see you.”

Wendy nods, shakily, and Tink leaves her there, shaking badly, without a word of comfort to her.

It’s more than what she deserves, anyway.

(For being such a  _foolish, foolish_  girl.)

It happens again the next night. The boy – Pan – throws rocks at her window, as she curls onto her side, and does her best not to cry into her pillow.

“Come out, come out,” he calls out, his voice loud in the silence of the town. She’s sure everyone’s listening, so she doesn’t dare move – lest the townsfolk find out that this is all her doing.

She shouldn’t have looked.

(And he should have let her be. But he hadn’t.)

But she had.

And now she was experiencing the consequences of her actions.

_Stupid, stupid girl_.

“Come on,  _bird_. Don’t fly away now. Come out, come out – let me break your  _wings_.”

It’s how the nickname starts. She thinks that she’s making him angry, by not coming out – and she’s praying, praying, praying – that her brothers are playing 70’s rock in their room, and her parents are sound asleep in their best – as well as the rest of the town – but she doubts Tink is – because Tink was cut up by the devil and lived to tell the  _tale_.

When she doesn’t appear at the window, peaking through the blinds, he yells up at her, tells her he wants to see her – and if she doesn’t, he won’t  _ever_  leave her alone. But if she goes outside, she knows, she _knows_  he’ll probably kill her – probably open her chest with his bare hands, pry her ribs away, and rip her heart out if she gives him the chance (and she was raised better than  _that_ , wasn’t she?) She thinks she might cry, as the panic begins to constrict her airways – as it makes her feel like something is crushing her lungs and filling them up with blood at the same time. But she doesn’t. She stays still, into the long hours of morning, until he doesn’t speak anymore.

(Till she passes out from exhaustion.)

The next night, there is silence. There is nothing – only the thudding of her heart in her ears, but she doesn’t think that she’s safe. She can’t  _be_ safe, not until the thinness in the air leaves, and the town is able to breathe normally again.

Her eyes are fluttering shut when she hears him, hears her calling out to him. No one in town has talked about it, as far as she knows – she wonders if any of them actually listen to him (probably not, having dealt with him for nearly a century) – but she knows that Tink has. Earlier that day, Tink had taken her aside into another alley, and had allowed Wendy to cry on her shoulder, for a brief moment, before leaving her again, feeling terrible and hollow and  _frightened_.

She remembers walking home, seeing her father wash the red writing off the wall. She had to run away from it, in order not to be sick.

“Bird, why don’t you come out to play with me?”

She shakes her head, even though she can’t see him, and thinks that it’s a small, small mercy that he might not know her face – and, for certain, he knows not her name. Only where she lives, and that she is easily,  _easily_  frightened.

“Do you want me to come up there and  _make_  you?”

Wendy hears something in his voice change, something predatory, something she doesn’t  _like at all_ , so she clutches her pillow to her chest with clammy arms, hiding under her sheets, shaking badly as he calls out to her.

“Come on, bird, I  _promise_  I won’t hurt you if you just come down to see me.”

Wendy shakes her head, biting her already-abused lip to keep herself form sobbing.

“Liar,” she whispers. He’ll  _kill_  her – or gut her, like he did to Tink – and, besides, if he didn’t kill her, Tink would, for going outside of her own free will.

He doesn’t speak and she wonders if he heard her.

She doesn’t find out that night – that early morning; silence abruptly follows.

A week of silence goes by, but he hasn’t left town yet. He is seen blending in and out with the shadows that buildings cast when the moon shines bright – when clouds don’t cover it – and she thinks that he must have grown bored of her.

Wendy is  _so, so wrong_.

After a whole week of nights filled with (somewhat) sleep-filled nights, she crawls into bed, and turns her light out – but when she hears his voice, that same panic she felt earlier resurfaces – but it’s sudden, and she chokes on it.

“Come to the window,” he says. She can’t hear the smirk in his voice anymore. He sounds commanding, demanding, and she wants to shove an iron poker down his throat – devil or not (but it’s not something she would do; it’s what  _Tink_  would want to do).

Wendy sits up, slowly, as her hands begin to shake. Even as they clasp the sheets between her clammy hands, they don’t cease their trembling; the fear she harbors for him as slithered out of her bones, and courses her through a body. It’s a poison without a cure – and it’s making her feel cold all over. It makes her want to retch, but she doesn’t. She  _can’t_.

“Do you want me up there, in your room, bird?”

By now, she knows she and Tink are the only ones listening.

“Do you  _want_  me to come up there? Because I will – I will  _gladly_  come up there, and drag you out here myself. And you don’t  _want_  that, bird. _Trust me_.”

A shiver crawls down her spine, as she slowly slides off her bed. She doesn’t want to risk it – risk hurting her family – her brothers, especially – but she can’t bring herself to pull away the blinds, so she – trying her hardest to stop her body, moving of its own accord ( _on instinct_ ) – peaks through them.

His hands are on his hips, and a smirk lights up his face when he sees her peaking back at him. It makes her mind reel. How could something so dark, so evil – something that haunted a town, haunted its people – killed whenever it wanted, whenever it deemed that it could, and should – look like  _that_? He wasn’t innocent-looking, by any means, but, if she hadn’t been raised here, in Storybrooke, she would have thought him human enough to be one.

“That’s it,” he coos at her –  _mockingly_ , as if she truly is a weak, spineless little bird – “now open the blinds.”

Her hands shaky uncontrollably as her hand moves and pulls the cord, and she is washed in moonlight as the blind goes up. She tweaks it, to the side, so it stays, and lets herself lean against the wall underneath the window for support; he knees are knocking together so badly, she can hardly stand up straight.

“ _Darling_ ,” he says, smiling up at her – with a mouthful of daggers, with a tongue wrapped in barbwire, with words dipped in a translucent poison – “unless you want me to come up and  _get you_ , I suggest you come down.”

Wendy can’t find it in her to do as he says. She feels a sob trying to escape her chest, trying to free itself from the cage of her ribs, and she shakes her head, biting her lips again until she tastes copper on her tongue.

He tilts her head at her, and something in his expression changes.

The Pan shrugs, and says to her, “Very well,” and when she blinks, he’s gone.

Two days pass by without incident. Tink tells her she heard him – not anything he said – but he’d sounded triumphant – sounded  _gleeful_  – and she tells her that she just might not get out of this alive. Tink reaches out, to rest a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but Wendy ducks away, and this time, it is she who leaves the other alone in a secluded corner.

The town is oblivious to her troubles, and she doesn’t want to burden it with them – she keeps her mouth shut, even when Emma looks at her funny – even when the wonderful Sheriff Swan pulls her aside, takes her hands in his (bless her soul, bless her heart –  _bless this woman_ ) and asks if anything’s happening, if there’s anything she should know about.

Wendy swallows around a lump in her throat, and shakes her head, giving Swan a tight smile, before ducking away, and leaving the blonde woman to stare after her.

(Emma doesn’t believe her.)

It’s the next night, when it happens.

Everyone’s locked up – battened down the hatches – and her house is asleep. But she is awake, trying to decide if she should go across the way and see if Belle is okay. Belle had been staying after hours at the pawnshop and had been forced to close up, since the sun had begun to set before she was even close to ready to leave.

Cowardly, tight-lipped Wendy is also a good person. A coward, perhaps – but, she wants to check on Belle. And she can’t see her through her kitchen window, so she creeps down her stairs, so she’s in the empty furniture room – closes the heavy door behind her, the one that leads up to the Darling residence, and goes to the front window of the shop. She hugs herself, clutching at her dress as she sees Belle through the glass of the pawnshop. Belle sees her and waves, before her blinds are closed – and Wendy is left alone in the moonlight.

Wendy sighs. Mr. Gold wouldn’t have let her live this down, if anything had happened to his beloved wife, especially since he’s really good at figuring out who could have done something to stop something bad from happening once the bad thing had already happened.

She’s about to turn, to go back upstairs, but then suddenly,  _he_  is pressing up against the glass, and a small shriek escapes her lips as she stumbles backwards – flails helplessly – and lands on her rear, on the hardwood floor. He laughs at her, as she gingerly picks herself off the floor.

This is one of those times she wishes she could be brave, like Emma, like Regina – like Snow – but she’s not. Instead, she hides her shaking hands by clutching at her dress, feeling cold as he leans up against the glass. His eyes wander over her, and he doesn’t say anything for a good, long while.

“Bird,” he says at last, when she’s just starting to feel like she’s going to crazy – maybe go outside and hit him with a frying pan, or something – or perhaps call the Sheriff and tell her to try and shoot the devil standing on the other side of the glass. “You’ve come out to  _play_.”

Wendy tries to shake her head  _no_ , tries to speak it – but all that comes out is croak, and he laughs at her – again – and she tries her very best not to cringe at the sound.

_He is a devil with a face of a boy stitched over the abyss that makes up his bones_ , she remembers someone telling her, whilst she was a little girl.

_He haunts our streets – this devil, this monster._

“Come on, then,” he says, tapping the glass to get her attention. “We haven’t  _got_  all night.”

“I – ” by some miracle, she finds her voice, though it cracks, and it shows just how frightened she is – how she has been, since before he started throwing rocks at her window. “I can’t.”

The Pan laughs. Throws back his head, and  _laughs_.

The sound rings (not unpleasantly) in her ears.

“Sure you can,” he says, pressing his hands against the glass. “You can come with me,  _Wendy_.”

“How – ”

“You think I wouldn’t know your name by now, Wendy Darling?” she feels her lower lips tremble, but she doesn’t cry – she can’t cry here. His expression shifts, and he flashes a smirk at her. “By the way – I’m Peter, Peter Pan.”

She chokes – and his mouth his filled with daggers and barbwire, all over again.

“Let me  _in_ ,” he says, “or come out.”

“Why?”

She’s not just asking why he wants her to come to him. She wants to know why he’s been tormenting her – after all, all she did was peak out her window, just to see who he  _was_.

“It’s because you  _looked_ ,” he says, gleefully, “you disobeyed the rules. You’ve been told to hide from me – to hide in your houses – to pretend you don’t see me – but you  _did_.”

Wendy doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to.

(In another life, she would have broken the glass to claw out his eyes with her blunt nails.)

“Don’t you  _see_?” he asks, “don’t you under _stand_?”

Wendy steps back, clutching at her throat. She can’t  _breathe_  properly, because of the way his eyes narrow at her – why can’t he leave her _alone_? – and before she knows it, he’s heading towards the locked door of the store.

Quickly, she shakes her head and he pauses. She scurries off, hoping he doesn’t break in ( _then everyone would know_ ), but, instead of going out into the alley – like he must expect her to – she goes in the back, opens the storage room, and shuts – and locks – the door behind her, breathing hard. Her vision is growing dim – and she knows it’s because her nerves have been shot to hell, because of this monster, this  _devil boy_.

Only thirty seconds pass her by before she hears her name being called through the wooden door. She leans against it, slides down, so she’s huddled on the ground.

Her hands go over her ears, and she squeezes her eyes shut, praying – praying and hoping and wishing – that he will go  _away_ , that he will leave her alone.

Eventually, the shouting stops, and the door stops rattling.

Slowly, Wendy takes her hands off her ears, and she breathes a sigh of relief when she –

“I’ll get you, Wendy,” she hears him hiss through the door, and her heart stutters – chokes –  _stops_  – at his words. “One way or another. Do you understand me?  _This isn’t over_.”

As the seconds tick by, the air begins to thicken.

Wendy waits, trying her hardest not to cry in the dark of the storage room, as it becomes easier to breathe. (He’s left – for now. She knows it’s better if she stays here, instead of going out to see if he’s still there.)

It’s Tink, who finds her, sometime later.

And it’s Tink who offers to leave Storybrooke with her. Because a devil is haunting her footsteps – because she’s more than likely not going to get out of this alive. Because she got away unscathed (because of the rising run), he wants her. Dead, or alive – her heart in his hands, or in the literal sense – they don’t know.

Tink knows he doesn’t leave survivors, with a memory. Without  _scars_. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen to Wendy, if she stays, but she doesn’t want to see the poor girl cut open – she doesn’t want to see her dead in the middle of the road, one morning, because the devil’s mood had turned as black as his heart. She doesn’t know any of this for certain.

But they leave; it’s for the best, anyway.

Even though they leave, he haunts her. Finds her, when he can. He’ll always haunt her footsteps – and he’s decided that it will end when she stops running from him, when she gives up the chase. She won’t do that, though – Tink will make sure of her. So he keeps chasing her.

(In another life, he would have taken her away to a land where she wouldn’t grow up. But in every life, he’ll always want her.)


	2. Part II.

When Peter Pan finds out Wendy is gone, only a week after the Darlings had said a sullen goodbye to the eldest child in their family, and to Tinker Bell, he breaks what rules the town thought they had.

It’s only been a week, but it is precious time, time to for Wendy and Tink to get away from Storybrooke – to put as much distance between them and him as possible – and while it may be precious time, it’s not enough.

When Peter Pan realizes that she is gone, he ends up dragging her little brothers outside, into the street. They kick and scream and swear at him, but he pays their protests no mind. He hears the parents screaming at him, screaming at him to let their sons go – but he ignores them too, and throws them to the ground.

Michael helps John to his feet, and they stand before the devil-boy – the wicked monster with barbwire stuffed down his throat, curling around his lungs like the creep ivy clings to a tree. The boys are scared of him – rightfully so; he sees their hands shaking – but their faces are stony masks, so he sneers, and grips the elder of the two by the collar of his nightshirt.

“Where’s that  _sister_  of yours?” he asks, giving him one good, hard shake, and he feels the boy’s bones rattle inside his skin as he does so. He doesn’t reply, he only makes a face at him (brave boy, but foolish, like his sister), so he shakes him again. Harder, this time, and when the boy’s head jerks backwards, and he hears the sound of a joint pop and sees a wince – he grins. “ _Tell_  me,” he says, “and I promise I won’t kill you – or your brother.”

The boy scowls and shakes his head.

“Like we’d ever tell  _you_.” He spits the words out, like it’s the worst he can do – and it does,  _does_  make him angrier.

The grin vanishes, and he throws the boy to the ground, in a brief show of frustration; he left, for only a  _week_  – and he’s come back to  _this_ , when he had so many fun  _things_  planned, for the two of them. He feels something dark, something tainted with a burning fire he hasn’t felt in – well – for as long as he can remember, and it makes the nerves under the skin of his fingers itch, to rip open someone’s chest, to have their blood on his hands – but he pushes the feelings deep, deep down, and he turns to look at the parents.

Mr Darling looks torn between running out into the street, and yelling at the devil till his voice is scratched away by the sheer intensity of his words, and Mrs Darling doesn’t look much different. But they know the rules –  _his_  rules – and it would be such a shame, truly, if they were to become  _orphans_.

“Don’t you want to save your  _sons_?” he asks, grabbing John by the collar of his shirt and shaking him, not taking his eyes off the Darlings’ parents. “Don’t you want to do the  _right_  thing and tell me where your daughter is?” Playing on people’s moral codes, it’s an amusing thing. Cruel, indeed – but he is a devil. He’ll see their hypocrisies unravel their beliefs if it means he’s that much closer to getting what he wants.

He sees the woman and man exchange a glance – and he gives out a harsh laugh – but waits for their answer. They’ll do what he wants, what’s expected to them; to condemn one’s child is a sin in this town’s eyes, isn’t it? Especially when he offers a deal like this – sparing two innocent lives so he can claim another, for himself, and perhaps stick a blade in the one whoever is the most insolent tonight, the one who helps him the least –

“She’s gone,” Mrs Darling says, and the word echoes inside his head – but his ears listen, his mind still takes in the way she speaks to him – the way she wrings her hands, the way her eyes dart from side to side. Leaning out the kitchen window, the parents look helpless.

 _Good_.

That’s what they get for making sure she’s  _gone_.

“She left soon after  _you_  did,” he hears John said. He doesn’t have to turn to hear the sneer in the little boy’s voice, and it makes him laugh – it’s a strained, horrid sound, and it’s something that sends shudders through the boys’ bones – it makes the parents begin to wish the sun would rise faster, so that he could disappear to wherever the hell he disappeared off to. “She didn’t tell us where she was going – neither of them did – ”

He turns around, and the boy startles, stumbling backwards into his brother.

“ _Who_ went with her?” he asks, taking a step forward. “Who helped her get away?”

The boy gulps – and he opens his mouth – but it’s the mother who speaks.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, and he turns his head, cocking an eyebrow at her; he doesn’t care to notice the way she shrinks back into the house as her gaze meets his. “They’re long gone, and they never told us.”

In a blink of an eye, he’s standing below her, dragging Michael with him by the air. The boy screeches, but he ignores him – and sneers. “You’re going to  _tell me_  who took her,” he says, his fingernails digging into the boy’s scalp, enough to make him cry out – “or I’m going to hang your boys’ remains like  _mobiles over a crib_.”

“It was Tinker Bell!” Mr Darling says, looking a few shades paler than he probably should look. At this, Peter grins, and releases the boy abruptly, letting him fall and hit the ground – hard.

“ _Tinker Bell_  took her?” A slow, vicious smirk forms on his face, and his lips pull back, revealing his white (dagger) teeth. “That wasn’t so hard, now,  _was_  it?”

The Darlings are breathing hard, looking tense, and he laughs at them. He sweeps off a boy, with an overly-dramatic use of his hands, and stands up.

 _Tink_ took her. Tink’s the one who took her away from his town – made it so much harder for him to play the games he wanted to play – made it so much harder to do the things he  _wanted_  to – and before anyone can think to start breathing properly, he’s gone.

(Not from the town, though; in the morning, they will find blood spattered on storefronts, broken glass littering the sidewalks outside of people’s homes, and a dead body of a man no one really knew lying outside Granny’s diner.)

John starts to cry, and Mrs Darling disappears inside the house as the boys drag themselves back into the building. They hope that the devil won’t find her.

They know better than to pray for it.

It’s growing close to dusk, the next day, and Wendy has finally fallen asleep in the little black sedan. It’s not anything fancy, nothing flashy – and it doesn’t smell funny, thank God. Wendy’s head is against the cool glass of the window as the one of Tink’s mix CDs continues on. They’re nearly out of the state, by now – having stopped frequently at different places, getting supplies, getting money from people who owed Tink a debt (Wendy had thought better than to ask about those few shady-looking people Tink had talked to in dark alleys and forgotten side-streets) – while Wendy had waited, with her nails digging into the car seat.

Pan hasn’t found him, not yet – and Tinks’ relieved. She thinks that, by now, he would’ve noticed their absence – and she’s very, very glad that they’re not going to be around when he finds out, that the object of his – well,  _obsession_  might not be the word she’s looking for – isn’t in town, and she’s even gladder that she’s – and Wendy – isn’t around to find out that it was  _she_  who suggested that Wendy leave Storybrooke, for an undetermined amount of time.

They drive, for days at a time, always looking over their shoulder, only spending nights in the same shitty motel thrice, if they can even manage that – and there are whispers, everywhere they go – that something evil sifts through the towns, through the wilderness – searching – because there are few, outside Storybrooke, who know of Pan – and things  _like_  him.

It’s not a lot of people, but it’s enough to tell Tink that she needs to keep moving. Until the thinness in the air fades away, she won’t stop running – she won’t let Wendy fall into his hands, not if she has anything to say about it. After all, they’ve known each other since before Wendy was even born. They grew apart as the eldest Darling child had grown, but now – now – Wendy needed Tink, and that was okay, because that’s what Tink’s  _here_  for.

They drive, and drive, and when the air becomes thicker – when the telltale signs of a devil coming their way are nothing more than lingering suspicions in the back of their minds, Tink calls someone. It’s a brisk conversation, that she has with someone – a man presumably – outside the car. They’ve pulled over at a rest stop, and Wendy is examining the contents of each CD, flipping through the booklets and examining the names of the songs and artists Tink has scribbled on blank pieces of paper to go along with the CDs – her mixes – and has selected one, out of pure curiosity, and is about to put it in when she hears something thump against the hood of the car.

It’s loud, and she drops the clear CD case. A small sound escapes her lips, and Tink is peering at her through her own window, giving her an apologetic look – but she has a feeling that she’s still annoyed with whoever she’s talking to.

A few minutes later, Tink climbs back into the sedan, starts the car, and drives off again. Wendy doesn’t ask who she was talking to until they reach a diner in a nondescript little backwater town, with milkshakes and fries from the sixties in their mouths and a healthiness in the air that makes it so, so  _easy_  to breathe.

“A friend of mine,” Tink says, but the way she says ‘friend’ makes Wendy raise an eyebrow. Her hair is pulled behind her in a ponytail, out of her eyes, and her jeans and sweatshirt hang loosely on her form. It’s easy to see she hasn’t been sleeping well, but the look she gives Tink would make her brothers’ mouths quirk upwards, if they were here.

“A friend?”

Tink scowls, shrugs, and sets down her empty milkshake glass. “Goes by the name of Killian – Killian Jones.”

“You don’t like him, then.”

“Not especially.”

“Why?”

Tink glances out the window, at the car – a nervous, cautious habit she’s either always had or had developed as soon as they had left Storybrooke, Wendy can’t really tell – before she looks back at the teenage girl in front of her.

“He’s an alcoholic, he’s crude – and he knows how to piss someone off. He even pissed off Pan once – nearly cost him his hand, the devil’d been so mad.”

“Why did you call him?”

Wendy doesn’t know if she likes the sound of this man. She doesn’t remember hearing his name before – so this must be someone not native to Storybrooke. She wonders why Tink would trust someone like that – when she trusts barely anyone at all.

“He’s an honorable man, despite how he is,” Tink explains – glancing out the window again. Wendy knows what this means; it means that they’re going to be leaving soon. It’s like Tinker Bell has some sort of sixth sense – a sense no one else seems to have – and it was either born out of experience, or she was born with it – she doesn’t know – “He owes me a debt – a large sum of money, actually – but the man agreed to let us stay with him for a few days, instead of him paying me.”

Tink doesn’t explain further, even when Wendy asks, to which the New Zealander replies, “it’s getting late; we should leave” and they do. Wendy doesn’t ask about the man Tink seems reluctant to go to for help again.

The next day, though, they get a call, from the man himself. Tink’s got the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder as she drives, and she can hear someone yelling over the phone. Tink winces every so often – rolls her eyes, too, once – and then, after the person at the other end of the line is done, she says “So Peter Pan got to you before we did.”

Wendy’s heart stutters – chokes – but she convinces it, somehow, not to stop. Her hands slip inside the sleeves of her navy sweatshirt, and she shrinks down in her seat a bit. They haven’t seen the devil-boy in over a week, and she would take this as a good sign – but she knows better than to think she and Tinker Bell are in the clear – especially sink they’d gotten a call earlier that morning, one that had told them Pan knew that Wendy was gone.

(An angry John and Michael had delivered the message, but before Wendy could speak to them, they had hung up.)

“So you got your hand cut off,” Tink says offhandedly to the man – Jones, right? – and Wendy blanches as the blonde woman beside her acts as if it’s one of the most normal occurrences in the world. (It’s not, it’s really not.) “In case you didn’t notice, I nearly  _bled_  to death, I saw Sydney with is limbs torn off in the middle of my street six years ago – and Wendy Darling is being  _hunted_.”

Something like a squawk can be heard from Killian’s end, and Wendy remains silent as they drive on.

“Yes, thanks for telling us, Jones. Yes, get that hand taken care of – and since we’re  _not_  going to – wait,” something in her tone changes, and she doesn’t miss how the older woman glances over her shoulder. There’s no one behind them, but her sudden shift in demeanor and expression makes dread creep up from the base of her spine, to the vertebrae below the bottom of her skull. The dread clings there, like it’s woven a path around her bones, and she wraps her arms around herself.

(A false illusion of comfort won’t do her any harm here, after all.)

“You told him that I called you.” Tink’s expression turns grim, and Wendy lets her head thump against her glass, her temple becoming cool because of the window. Outside the car, endless, empty fields stare back at them, with storm clouds hovering above them. (It’s going to rain, she thinks.

“You told him that I was bringing  _Wendy_.”

The older woman just sounds  _mad_  now. Not desperate, not scared – never scared, not Tink, not ever  _Tinker Bell_ , who had stared down the devil himself, ready to face death with more dignity than he could ever hope any of his victims could muster –

“Did to you tell him how far we were from you? How many days? Because of you did  _that_ , Killian, so help me, I will slit your  _throat_  – ”

The man squawks through the phone so loudly that Wendy has to hide a smile, because it’s actually quite comical, with how loud he yells at Tink, in the way that he does.

“ _No! That’s why I lost my bloody hand!”_

Tink makes a face, mutters an insult that Wendy doesn’t quite catch, and hangs up. The woman seems to slouch a little, with a scowl on her face.

The tiny smile on the eldest Darling’s lips dies, as silence descends upon the little black sedan.

They don’t speak again. It’s mainly because Tink wants to tell Wendy why he’s after her – because Killian told her – Killian had told her that Pan doesn’t just want Wendy, he  _wants_  her – in only way a devil-boy can. It’s twisted, it’s not right, but this world – it never is.

(In another life, Tinker Bell would have confessed everything, and would have tried her best to keep her away from Peter Pan. But in this life, she keeps the precious information secret.)

Two days later, they find themselves in another city – one they don’t care to remember the name of – they never do, since they never stay long anyway, but this time, their plan – their routine plan, after about two weeks after leaving Storybrooke (Wendy is homesick and scared but she won’t say anything because Tink is doing this out of whatever kindness she has left in her heart). Their plan is for the older of the two to go inside a store, grab some food, and then find some shitty motel to stay the night in; sleeping in the car is what they try to do two days out of the seven in the week at the very least, as often as possible – it’s making the money they’ve put together goes a lot slower, so they have a plentiful amount left over – and so Tinker Bell does, and Wendy waits, in the ringing silence, and shivers. January hasn’t been kind, so far. Christmas passed soon after they’d left, but there hadn’t been any cheer in the air this time. They hadn’t done anything for New Year’s, either – because it wasn’t a time for celebrating.

Perhaps, in anther life, they would have, despite the circumstances.

(But that is not  _this_  life.)

Wendy waits, inside, trying to keep herself calm – tying to keep unhelpful thoughts out of her head – when she feels it.

 _The air is suddenly thinner; it’s suddenly much harder to breathe_.

Wendy’s lungs haven’t felt like this in nearly two weeks – two weeks of worrying, of being scared, of trying to keep Tink has happy as can be, even though she never asked to be a part of this ( _though this was sort of her fault for looking out at the devil when she was supposed to be asleep_ ) – even though she didn’t want the older woman to bother with her (because she has suffered enough.)

Wendy looks over her shoulder, as goose-flesh surfaces under the soft material of her sweatshirt. She can’t see anything in the street behind her, but her heart is beginning to pound a little louder – beat a little faster – inside her head. Wendy knows she should stay in the car – scrunch herself down, and hope that what she thinks is near won’t pass by – won’t  _see_  her, won’t  _sense_  her – and she knows what happened _last_  time she peaked out the window, she so reaches for her mobile phone – the one Tink made her take with her, and she sends the New Zealand-born woman a text, telling her,

“ _The air is thin again_.”

Something bangs against the window, and she shrieks, jolting in her seat, her heart beating a million miles a minute as her eyes go to the source of what had scared the living hell out of her.

But it’s only Tink, who’s giving her an concerned expression. She comes around, to the other side, and gets into the car.

“Let’s go,” Tink says, starting the car – the woman is trying so hard to ignore how the girls hands are shaking her lap – “it’s not safe here, we need to get out –”

“Really? We haven’t even  _started_  yet.”

Both young women freeze, at the sound of the voice in the back seat. Wendy’s heart literally stops – and before she knows it, Tink has locked the doors – all but hers, and is shoving Wendy out of the car. Wendy doesn’t need to be told twice, as she stumbles and begins to run.

She hears vicious, roaring laughter behind her, and she chokes on a sob as she turns a corner – hears muffles swears from Tinker Bell, bless her soul, bless her heart – as she hears the car start, but she doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop running – because one glance tells her that Peter is behind her, right behind her, and she feels a scream escape her throat as she feels his hands grip her hip bones, and shove her to right.

Wendy stumbles at the sudden move, and loses her balance. Her feet get tangled at the ankles as she collides with the brick wall, and slides to the ground. Tear-less sobs escape her lips as she tries to scramble to her feet – away from Peter – just far enough so Tinker Bell can whisk her up and then they can make a speedy escape out of this city,  _away from him_  –

Cold hands grab her hair, and yank her upwards. She lets loose a scream, and begins to flail – kick – whatever she can do – and she strikes him in the stomach, once, and he  _laughs_. She hears him calling her name, taunting her as his hand finds her arm, and his nails dig into her skin – hard enough to bleed, from crescent-moon marks.

“Let me go, let me  _go_ , Peter,” she shrieks, over and over, but he’s having  _none_  of it, now, even though he’s grinning like a maniac – because he’s had to go through a  _criminal_  – Killian Jones himself – to find them, he’d searched for nearly  _two_  weeks – and now she was here,  _thrashing_  and kicking and making this victory all the more sweeter –

Something hard strikes him on the back of his head. His vision darkens, for moment, and his grip loosens enough for her to shove him away and run to the Tink’s car, get in – and they drive away, leaving him clutching his aching head, muttering curses under his breath as his vision clears. He swears, and vanishes, before anyone can see him standing in the street.

He’d been  _so close_  – and that  _woman_ , the woman he had let  _live_  – had made sure she could get away.

It makes him so,  _so_  angry.

The next few days are spent driving, breaking the speed limit, with Wendy curled up in the back seat. Wendy doesn’t speak – she only sleeps, with a blanket thrown over, as she tries her best not to cry whilst she is awake – while Tink drives. They only stop for bathroom breaks and to stock the sedan with food – but other than that, they keep driving.

Tink will  _not_  let Peter Pan get Wendy.

A few days later, their car breaks down. When Tink investigates, she’s dismayed that something under the hood has been disconnected – and she doesn’t have the tools to fix it. They’re stranding, in the parking lot of a grocery store, so Tink and Wendy both go off to buy the tools necessary to get the car back on the road.

None of them have to say anything to know that this is probably Pan’s fault.

By dusk, they’re on the road again – they’d paid the idiot mechanic to just fix the damn car, instead of him trying his hardest to explain to them how to use the overpriced tools he’d been willing to sell them. By the time they’re on the road, the air has become thin again – and they’re breaking the speed limit law by well over forty, but neither can bring themselves to care – because the devil is near, and the last thing they want is to encounter him –  _again_.

They’re not as lucky as they hoped they’d be.

They’ve just exited a small town, three days later, while the air is still thin, and the dread curled around Wendy’s spine has pulled it taught and stuff, when it happens.

They’re driving along, when they see a figure standing in the road ahead of them. Tink doesn’t stop the car; she only goes faster, and it takes Wendy a moment to realize that, on this lonely stretch of highway – with empty wheat fields all around them and scarce, scattered bunches of pine trees, they’re going to run Peter  _over_.

Wendy can’t help it as she covers her eyes, trying her  _so, so_  hard not to cry as she waits for the car to jolt, to bump something – she waits for the telltale, sickening sounds of metal cracking bone – but it doesn’t come. She takes her hands away from her eyes when she hears Tink say, “that little  _bastard_ ” –

And then everything goes to hell.

They hear a vicious, animalistic roar from Peter – and it’s suddenly so hard to  _breathe_  – and Tink’s hands fly off the wheel to clutch at her throat, and as the car swerves abruptly, to the side –  _Pan’s doing_  – without the driver controlling it (because he’s pulling the oxygen out of the car, so they cannot  _breathe_ ), it spins off the road.

Everything seems surreal, as the car flips over – rolls off the road, jolting its passengers violently – like how a child would shake a toy care once it broke it – and by the time they stop, Wendy’s not completely sure she’s alive.

Her body aches, something warm is on her shirt, and she feels numb all over. Her vision dims, for a moment, before she realizes that Tink isn’t moving.

Wendy can’t stop herself from shouting – from shrieking – pleading, wanting Tinker Bell to wake up, but the woman’s face is covered in her own blood –  _oh god, there’s so much blood_  – and she sees that there’s a large gash in her head. She can’t tell how bad it is – but the woman doesn’t look like she’s breathing, and a broken “don’t leave me here” escapes her lips as she tries to move her body –

And she  _screams_.

A pain tears through her entire body, and a sob passes her chapped, bleeding lips as she looks down.

A piece of the windshield sticks out from her belly. Her blood soaks the sweatshirt, soaks the shirt and her pants – and she begins to panic, trying to move and trying not to all at once. She becomes hysterical, because Tink might be  _dead_ , and she might be  _dying_ , and –

Peter’s face appears in her peripheral vision, and something caught between a shriek and as sob escape her lips as he reaches in, but pauses, when he sees the shard of glass sticking out of her belly. She screams and cries and sobs at him, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.

His face is perfectly blank, for all of five seconds, before his expression turns  _angry_ , but then something’s happening – he’s undoing her seatbelt –  _how did he reach around her?_ – he’s murmuring something to himself, and she catches the words  _“not going to let this happen_ ” being muttered under his breath as she finds herself being pulled out the overturned car.

She screams, as the glass digs into her skin, as her damaged body scrapes across the ground as he drags her away from the wreckage that  _he_  made.

“I’ll kill you,” she finds herself croaking out, with tears falling down her blood-spattered cheeks (from the gash on Tink’s had), “I’ll kill you if she’s  _dead_.”

Peter scoffs at her, but says nothing; he kneels over her body, and before she knows it, his hands are around the glass shard sticking out of her stomach ( _it hurts so bad but she knows she isn’t feeling all of it because she has to be in shock and she will **kill**  him because Tinker Bell might be dead_) –

“ _What the hell do you think you’re doing?”_

It’s Tink, and Wendy screams at her, for making her think she was _dead_ , as the woman tries to drag herself out of the car, but Peter scowls at her.

“I’m trying to  _save_  her,” he snarls, “and I  _can_.”

“You don’t get the right,” Tink hisses, slumping over on the ground, half of her body out of the vehicle, the other half still inside of ti. “You don’t get the  _right_ , since you’ve been trying to –”

“It will not end like  _this_ ,” he says, cutting her off, and before any of them can do anything, they hear sirens in the distance. “I haven’t come this far, haven’t suffered  _this much_ , to be denied because of what  _you_ say.”

The sirens go ignored, and before Wendy knows is, there’s a searing pain in her belly – and she lets loose a scream as it touches her from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair, and she almost –  _almost_  – blacks out from the pain. She’s bleeding now, more than ever – and she hears Tinker Bell say, “ _you fucking idiot, you’ve **killed**  her_,”

“I can  _save_  her,” he shouts, as Wendy’s head lulls to the side. Tears continue to make paths on the blood splattered on her face, and the fact that she still breathes gives the devil-boy his confidence. He slaps his hand over the wound, as he tugs her close to him, and  _breathes_ , in and out,  _in and out_ , while the woman continues to scream at him, over and over as the sirens slowly,  _slowly_  get closer.

“I – I can’t do it here,” he says, and he turns to the blonde woman. She’s probably injured her spine – but he doesn’t’ care –  _does not care_ – because the girl in his arms – the one his twisted, black heart (what’s left of it) threatens to crack his  _mind_ , threatens to break him – if he lets her die – and so his expression morphs into something like a sneer. “I’m taking her  _with_  me,” he says, “I’m going to  _save_  her, and then I’m going to  _keep_  her.”

“You can’t do that, Pan,” Tink rasps as Peter stands, carrying Wendy – _carefully?_  – in his arms. She’s nearly overcome with the blood-loss now, he needs to  _hurry_  –

“I can,” he says, and puts a foot forward, right on her spine, and _stomps_.

The scream that comes out of her mouth makes his insides twist, and he yanks his foot away.

Yes, her spine was  _definitely_  injured.

“What –  _I’ll kill you_ –” She’s choking on sobs, now, and he sneers down at her.

“I’d love to see you  _try_ ,” he hisses, “and that was for  _taking her away_. But I won’t kill you, not now,” he says, glancing down at Wendy, who’s weakly clawing at his arm, muttering incoherent words under her breath, “I won’t, because I’ll make sure you  _see_  her again. And when you do, she’ll be  _mine_.”

“Like – hell – ”

But Peter Pan and Wendy are gone, before her eyes.

Tinker Bell curses.

_He won._

_The fucker won – after **everything**._

Months pass, and she heals; he, indeed, hadn’t killed her. Months pass, and Tink has already mourned Wendy. She’s returned to Storybrooke, without Wendy – in a wheelchair, no thanks to what Pan had done to her spine by crashing the car – and weeks pass, after she returns, when she hears her name being called, at dawn, one Monday morning.

Tink is out of her house and rolling down the street with tears in her eyes and a will in her heart not to believe what she hears, but when she sees Wendy – Wendy, Wendy Darling – a smile spreads across her face as she runs towards her – looking tired, looking worn, looking  _different_ altogether – and she’s throwing her arms around the girl, before asking question after question after question.

Tink can only stare into the bleakness of Wendy’s eyes as she speaks the words she’d never thought she’d hear.

“He let me go, Tink.”

“ _What_?” Tink refuses to believe it – unless – unless –  _unless_  – the devil actually  _did_  have a twisted, blackened, decaying heart stuck inside his chest – and,  _that_  means –

"It’s true, Tinker Bell. I’m here _; he let me go.”_


	3. Chapter 3

The morning sunlight filters in through the windows of the diner. The air is crisp and clean; the month of May has been good to the town, so far – maybe it’s because they’ve gone this long without the air growing thin, maybe it’s because they haven’t seen nor felt nor heard any kind of evil walk their streets since – well, since sometime after Wendy Darling and Tinker Bell had left – trying to do the right thing.

Many of the townsfolk have already spoken to Wendy, given her tight smiles and awkward “welcome home”s, mainly because they’d helped her get out of town – because it’s not every day that you condemn a child to the mercy (probably lack thereof) of a devil.

Her family has wept with joy – relief – at seeing her alive. Her brothers had clung to her, until they had been urged to go off to school – even with their sister back – after several months of her being somewhere, where nobody could find them. She hadn’t wanted to see her parents, though – they’d been too swift in encouraging her to get gone, to leave Storybooke. So they’ve left her alone, save for the few who sit in and around the booth at the diner.

Tink sits in front of the table, in her wheelchair; she seems to be glowing, which is saying a lot – because of the townspeople she’s put up with since her return as a crippled woman from a wreck that was the fault of a greedy, selfish, twisted demon. The town had only been relieved momentarily when she’d been helped out of the special passengers’ bus – by none other an a one-handed man called Killian Jones – but when they had seen that Wendy was not with her, they had known. They had resented Tinker Bell – for failing in her self-appointed task to keep the eldest Darling child safe.

They hadn’t the right; the desensitized, traumatized, hell-enduring, typically-sullen town hadn’t the goddamn right to treat her as they did, as they had. She’d done the best that she could, she’d tried what she could – and she was in a wheelchair because of it, paralyzed from the waist down, because her spine – it – it had been unrepairable. It had made things a bit worse – but she’d had Killian at her side, who’d rented a room, and was staying with her – for a short while – because he sort of blames her for him losing his hand to Pan – so he plans on making her miserable while simultaneously helping her as much as she lets him.

Emma Swan is sitting across from the girl that’s just come home – just come out of nowhere – with a worn-out smile on her face. Emma never believed in sending her away – not even when Tink had threatened to slit her throat if they didn’t let them leave – and she’s one of the few how hadn’t shunned Tink. One of the very few.

Ruby is sitting next to Wendy, nearest the window. She has an arm slung about the girl’s shoulder, with a grin on her face. Besides Tinker Bell, Ruby is one of the girl’s only friends. She’s been a good friend, over the years, and piled into the booth, in between Jones and the sheriff is Ariel.

Other people mill about in the diner. Their eyes always shift to Wendy, and she pretends to ignore them. Pretends to, because no one really matters to her – not right now, not when all she wants to do is find a bed that’s not her own to curl up in and cry herself to into a never-ending sleep – but Tink’s here, and Emma’s here – they’re all here for her, and she remembers that, not too long ago, this is exactly where she wanted to be.

Wendy is holding a cup of tea in her hands. She’s barely sipped it, barely looked at anyone since she came into the diner and sat down, and said her hellos.

It’s not difficult to see that she’s changed.

It’s Emma who asks for the group of them – she asks is she’s okay, just as a general question – because what else can you possibly ask a girl who was swept away to a place where nobody knows by a devil with a boy’s face stitched to his skull?

Wendy smiles.

It’s small thing, and it’s not pleasant – because no, Wendy Darling is not okay; the girl isn’t even in a fifty-mile radius of the word – not since January. She’s never been okay – but she looks at the helplessness buried deep in Swan’s eyes, and she can’t bring herself to spit out words in her direction like he would have.

Wendy doesn’t reply; she stares into her tea, and the slowly smile fades away, and her shoulders droop. Emma looks like she could take back her question – and for an awkward moment, nobody speaks – but then Tinker Bell does, because Wendy was her responsibility, and she wants to know what happened – she wants to peel the skin from the girl’s bones and see exactly what Peter Pan has done to her, to change her so much.

“What did he do to you, Wendy?”

Her voice is low, and her eyes are narrowed. The warmth that had seeped into them once she had laid eyes on Wendy was now ice, and it made her avoid the source of the accented voice’s eyes, because she knows that none of them would understand, not truly – so she only shakes her head, and takes a sip of her tea.

It’s cold, but she swallows what she put in her mouth, and sets it on the table. She tells everyone she’ll catch up with them later – that she’s tired, and she want so to sleep – and she abruptly gets up and leaves. She doesn’t wait when Ariel and Ruby call after her, and she doesn’t turn around to see Tinker Bell rolling out of the diner, concern written all over her face as she catches up to Wendy.

Tink opens her mouth to talk to her, to ask her what the fuck happened while she was with the demon – she wants to know what he said – what he did – where they were – if she was okay – if he hurt her – and, most of all, she wants to know why he let her go – because, surely, the devil himself cannot truly care enough for a human enough to – to do the right thing –

But she feels her wheelchair lurch to a stop, and she turns her head, to glare at Killian. He shakes his head, tells her to leave the “lass” be, and he wheels her away, despite her angry and loud protests.

Wendy doesn’t go home, though, like her mother told her to.

“When you’re done in the diner, come on home, and we can talk if you’d like.”

The thing is, Wendy doesn’t want to talk. She doesn’t want to see her family – she can barely even look them in the eye, though, they can’t very well do the same. But she understands – she gets it – though she still doesn’t want to talk to them just yet. She doesn’t really want to talk to anyone, despite how supportive people are trying to be. But their pitying looks and over-the-shoulder glances are getting to her, and she needs to be alone.

The eldest Darling finds herself wandering outside, heading aimlessly down the road to the town limits. She’s never been allowed to go this far – it’s always been rumored that if you go past “the town line”, you’re at risk – and someone might snatch you up, and you’ll never be seen again. But something like that hasn’t happened; nobody’s stepped over the line. They’ve hopped over it, they’ve driven over, but never stepped over.

She doesn’t care, though. She doesn’t care that her body’s hungry, that she needs sleep. Her legs move for her, despite her mind’s screaming at her bones, to stop, to be happy that she’s home, but all she can do is keep her eyes downcast while her heart retreats into the memories she wished she never had.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

When Wendy awakens, she feels sluggish – but she knows she’s not in Tink’s car – and she can’t quite remember where they’d fallen asleep, or why there’s an ache in her stomach – or why Peter Pan –

Everything comes crashing back to her, as she lies on the cot in the dark house. It nearly makes her convulse where she lies – but she does sob, she does cry – and her hands find their way under her navy sweatshirt – dried with her blood? – and find bandages, and through the material, she thinks she feels stitches.

She sits up, ignoring her aching body, trying to forget that Tink had been left lying in the dirt –

Her mind reels, as she remembers – remembers the car being turned over, remembers him standing over her – remembers his hands soaked in her blood – and he – he saved her. After everything, she realizes, looking down at herself, he has saved her.

But for what? For another kind of hell?

Wendy looks around, and decides she’s either in a very small house, or an apartment. She stands, her bare feet touching the floor, but her body doesn’t let her stay upright for long. She falls to the floor, idly wondering if she has a concussion – or if that demon did something to her – and hits her head on the corner of a table.

By the time Pan comes back to her, half of her face lies in a puddle of her own blood.

He cleans it up without a word or sneer.

The next time she wakes, it’s days later – and her clothes are actually changed. Surprisingly, she doesn’t cry, when she sees him after sitting up – no, she surprises him by lunging at him, ready to dig her fingers into his eyes – but he had only laughed at her, caught her wrists in his spindly, skeletal hands, and had shoved her, hard, so her back met the corner of the desk – the very same oaken one she’d hit her head on the day before because she had stupidly stood up when she hadn’t even had the energy to form coherent thoughts – and she grimaces.

He stays where he is, watching her carefully, his eyes glued to her – but then he’s gone, when she blinks, and she’s left with aching (bruising) wrists and a sore spinal cord.

She wonders what Tink would say if she could see her now.

The next two days are spent trying to decide if she should run out the door or not. He hasn’t really spoken to her – when she flings herself at him, to try and hurt him as much as a human can hurt a devil – when she flails her arms, with blunt nails, and a cry of anger – a cry of anger born from panic and frustration and dread and every fucking emotion that’s pooling inside her skull and inside her stomach, making her only able to eat little of what he gives her – he takes her arms, and either holds her still, till she’s exhausted herself, or he shoves her.

When he shoves her, it’s always away from him – with a grin or a sneer on his face – and she either hits the desk, the wall, the floor, or is sent sprawling – tripping – over the cot and landing painfully on her side.

He leaves, once a day, but he told her once he hasn’t gone back to Storybrooke – because he has her now – and one the third day – or was it the fourth or fifth of her captivity? – she never looks out the windows of the room she’s in, she never opens the door and sees – she decides that she should see, she decides that it’s time to go back – or, at least – it’s high time she should try and get out while he’s not here – before he catches her.

(In another life, she would know – she would always, always know – that he would be after her. But that is not this life.)

Wendy finds out, as she runs down the hall – in a white shirt, in dark sweat pants that aren’t hers (he’s had to clean the blood off her skin more than once now), with bare feet, with her hair flying behind her – that she’s in some sort of apartment building. She doesn’t recognize it, doesn’t care to – want to – try to – so she runs, runs, runs, as fast as she possibly can.

She finds the elevator – but goes for the stairs instead. She takes one, then two at a time, her heart pounding in her ears, her stomach still aching from where she’d been impaled with a shard of the windshield (but Tinker Bell had looked so much worse off and she has to find her and see if she survived because she couldn’t live with herself if the woman was dead after all their efforts) but without pause she flies down the stairs, jumping the last part – landing hard on her two feet, her ankles pulsating pain for a moment, on the cold ground, but she keeps running.

Adrenaline floods her veins as she escapes out a side door – through a narrow alley, with her arms scraping against the damp brick sides (it’s just rained, she realizes, in a small corner of her mind – that’s taking in all the small details that the rest of her mind and body are ignoring – like how broken glass crunches underfoot – and it hurts like hell – she’s leaving bloody footprints – and how she’s actually vaguely worried about tearing her stitches, since, apparently, it had taken both a medical mind and the power of a devil to keep all of her blood inside her body – and how the cold stings her cheeks, the bare skin of her ankles, her toes, numbs her fingers (but not her heart not her heart).

The rest of her is going into overdrive. All she can hear is her heart beat, and the sound of her bare feet pounding on the pavement under her bare, bloody feet – nearly oblivious to the cold, the damp, and to the pain – both in her feet, in her head, and her belly.

She gets far. Far enough to see a tree line, so she runs for it; people have called out to her, asked her who she was –what she was running from – because she’s not aware of the tears that had stained her cheeks for a brief, few moments once she had turned a corner, leaving the brick apartment building behind.

Eventually, she reaches it – but the air has grown thin, and it’s getting harder to breathe, so she forces herself onward, into the trees, even though fallen twigs and natural debris crunch painfully underfoot, even though swaying, naked branches scratch at her cheeks as she flies by – even though her stomach is burning and her heart hurts she keeps going.

(In another life, she would have avoided the trees altogether – because memories were burns and chiseled and carved into the bark. But, alas – this is not that life.)

“Wendy, Wendy, Wendy-bird! Bird, come back!”

Peter’s voice is taunting – he hardly sounds out of breath (how long has she been gone? Did he know that she’d left as soon as she’d had, or – or something else) – and before she knows it, a hand has grabbed her arm, and yanked her to the side.

She stumbles. Collides with a tree. Falls to the grown, in a gasping, heaving heap, trying claw at the ground – trying to scramble to her feet, but he catches her ankle in his cold, cold hands, and he wrenches her back to him.

He traps her, then and there, laughing down at her like she’s the most entertaining game he’s ever played. She tries to kick – she tries to punch – she screams and shouts – but doesn’t cry, and by the time he’s dragging her through the trees, there are bruises blooming on her wrist, a bite mark on her collar bone, bloody crescent moons indented into the creamy skin of her waist.

For the next few weeks, it goes on like this. She will run – and sometimes, she’ll get as far as the trees. But every time, he always ends up trapping her on the ground, or on the wall, with his fingers digging into her skin. For the next few weeks, his eyes are hungry – and his lips are forever turned up in a twisted smirk.

(It’s so easy to forget everyone else when you’re living with a devil.)

It’s not entirely clear – why he wanted her in the first place – and she asks, until she is shoved away from him, and a snarl is what she gets as a reply. They talk, sometimes – on occasion, he’ll taunt her about her town, or speak of it – in a way that makes her heart ache for her family – but then she remembers that she is the reason he’s not visiting Storybrooke anymore. Sometimes, he’ll talk to her – about something idle, something that doesn’t matter – and other times – other times – they don’t speak at all.

Typically, before he disappears, off into the world (to wherever the fuck he goes; he’s never told her, even when she’s asked him) he stares at her – with something dark in his eyes.

Things change in February.

Wendy is contemplating a new escape plan. She’s seen the bus stations on her way out of the city – in the last month that she’s been kept here, for an unclear reason – she’s seen the taxies, and she knows they’ve seen her. She’s planning to take a bus – to hitch a ride, maybe – to anywhere outside the city. Hell, they could leave her in ditch – it would make her feel better, and it would not be here.

But, as she’s been planning, she begins to notice things about Peter Pan – things that the tales said, and things she was never told as a little girl. He is cruel, he is violent – he’s bit her thrice now, all in different places, too (which is infuriating, because if she had any control over this situation, he would be choking on his own blood on the floor for doing what he’s done – for saying what he’s said – for being the devil-boy that he is).

But he has his moments. Everyone does, Wendy supposes, but she never really expected this monster from hell to have his moments.

He’s told her little about his motives – about himself – and he’s less than kind to her – but, at times, he’ll give her a book to read for a little while, or he’ll simply leave her alone – be in the same vicinity, of course – but he’ll let her rest, let her plot and plan inside her head as the days pass, and she soon – slowly – thinks of her old home as a distant memory. But she still knows she needs to get out; he’s not going to Stockholm Syndrome his way into her heart, into her head – she won’t let that happen.

He doesn’t try and poison her mind like they say he does. He doesn’t remind her about how eager (but they’d been sullen so that had to count for something, right?) her parents had been – how eager, the majority of the townsfolk had been – to be rid of her. He doesn’t bring up Tink, but he does mention, once, that he left her alone. He hadn’t killed her.

That was something, unbeknownst to her, that he had done, for her. (From what he’d seen, it had done him – done her – done them both – some good. He’d regretted it, though – somewhat – not taking the chance he’d had to rip her to pieces because she had seen him again, after he’d let her go.)

Things shift, by the end of February. They change.

Wendy’s run again. She’s run farther than before. Barefoot, still in sweatpants with black shirt pulled over her torso – one of his – with thirty cents in her pocket. It’s enough to get her on the bus closest to the apartment he’s kept her in, made her stay with him in – and even though passengers glance at her feet, even though they notice how the sleeves of the shirt are pulled over her fingers – even though they all have this feeling that’s something is horribly, terribly wrong with this girl – with whatever she’s dealing with – and she sits in the back of the bus, and curls into herself.

No one pays her any mind. All she wants to get as far away from Peter as possible. She doubts she’ll get home – that she’ll ever to get to Maine by herself – because he’d catch her and skin her and hang her bones on a wall before he’d let that happen.

She’s been used to the thinness of the air – since his comings and goings have been blending together, and it feels strange – easier to breath – and she knows that, if – when – he drags her back, back to that damned apartment, she’ll have to adjust again.

She transfers buses, once she’s forced to get off. They don’t make her pay – apparently, that’s a thing – because she’d lived in a town small enough where everyone knew of everyone and it had been small enough to the point where you didn’t need a bus to go where you were trying to get it.

She gets on a more crowded bus – and tries not to cringe as she sits next to a stocky, pale woman, who smells like mothballs – who gives her a disapproving (yet pitying) look when she notices the state in which her feet are in.

They go to another city; Wendy’s not sure where, because she kept nodding off, and by the time she had gotten off, the sun had yet to rise in the sky, and she’s shivering as she walks slowly down the street. She’s never had better air in lungs – never, never, never – and she knows, instinctively, that this city has never known a devil, never known an evil quite like the one who’s been leaving marks on her body, under skin, in the deepest, darkest place in her heart (she hates him she says she does but she thinks he might be lost he never stays but never leaves her and for that – because she reads him better than she thought she ever could have – for that, she pitied him, for a brief moment, and her kind heart had remembered that moment ever since) – he’s done something to her, scraped his name into the inside of her bones (literally) – he is evil and this city, this place, has never known it and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t envious.

When Peter comes back to the apartment, around three in the morning, and finds Wendy gone, he isn’t surprised – isn’t worried at all – till he can’t find her, can’t find her anywhere – and, for a moment, he panics. He let’ something foreign and human take hold of him.

Three people are found dead in the streets by four o’clock. They bones have been plucked from their bodies, he’d ripped open their chests – bruised them, broke them, in a fit of rage (panic).

Then, he had started to look. Frantically, wondering if he’d ever see her again – because he would not stand for losing something like Wendy – because she had managed to simply slip away from him in the dead of night.

Meanwhile, Wendy wanders – aimlessly. Her body has grown numb, and her teeth are clenched, painfully so – so they won’t clatter together. Her covered hands rub and down her arms, and her feet ache. She’s lost, she admits it – she doesn’t know anyone here – she doesn’t know where she’s going – and – and by now, he should have caught up with her.

By all accounts, Peter Pan should be shoving her to the ground, with the intent on drawing blood. It was a sick thing, it was – but he was a devil, and so she had become accustomed to it – as well as doing her very, very best to fight back.

He’d only gotten a bloody lip from her once. He’d laughed. Crashed his mouth onto hers, before leaving her, with a bleeding bite mark on her hip, on the floor of the apartment – nearly two weeks ago.

(Kisses – they always make her mouth bleed into his – mean nothing to her. She tells herself this, because they leave her heaving for breath. He starves her, deprives her of oxygen – till she’s nearly choking – and then he’ll shove her back down to the floor when she’s about to kick him off her. It’s a violent thing, it truly is – and, for whatever reason, she’s been getting better at lying to herself. Day after day.)

But Peter’s not here right now. It makes her wonder if he’s finally given up on her – finally gotten bored of her, of the game he forced on her. It’s okay with her, it really is – but she wants to cry, because she’s lost, and she’s not sure where she should go –

—because Storybrooke had been eager to be rid of her; not all of it, but most of it, and, what would that do – for them? If she went back? Pan would surely return to old habits – since the object of his attention was no longer exciting to him – no long unique and promising to him – and she’s okay with that, she really is – but –

Well, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to go home. She wants to see Michael and John – her parents, not so much – she wants to see if Tink made it (because Pan hadn’t killed her), she wants to see Belle and Ariel and Ruby and Sheriff Swan (bless that woman’s heart) – but she probably, probably shouldn’t go back.

Wendy can’t help it.

She finds an alley, slumps down, and cries.  
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She’s long passed the town line by now. No one’s come after her – but, perhaps, nobody cares. Perhaps, her suspicions have been confirmed. Maybe nobody truly wants her back. How could they? She’d cost a life – hadn’t she heard that? – after she’d left town. She probably brought their hell back to town – the one she’d been keeping away for several months.

Wendy is so lost her in thoughts that she doesn’t notice that her hands are shaking, that her eyes are sightless, as she continues to remember – she doesn’t notice that her heart is aching, inside her chest.

(In another life, she would have screamed at the townsfolk. She would have cried, she would have kicked and claw and bit till she was satisfied – but that’s not this life; in this life, she feels broken all over. It feels wrong, and she wants to retch and she wants to cry and sleep and weep for joy all at once –

—but she keeps on remembering.  
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

It’s long past morning, when Peter finds her, in the alley. Wendy stopped crying hours ago – but she hasn’t moved, hasn’t budged – and when he crouches down in front of her, she only glares at him.

His hands are shaking, badly, with rage – and, for a moment, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s torn between killing her, kissing her till she’s starved for breath, and gathering her to him and simply taking her back, back to the apartment.

So he lets his hands chose. He barely thinks about what he does next.

His hands grab her by the shoulders, and he drags her to him. Rain falls above them, soaking his hair – and she’s already drenched – and he forces her to look at him, their noses nearly touching as the cold settles around them like a sickness, like a fog.

“You – you left,” he said. He’s so angry, he’d panicked because of her – because of this stupid little human –

“I did,” she said, lifting her chin, and giving him a frown. “I left.”

“And then you just gave up, bird?” he asks, scoffing. “Pathetic. What happened to going home, hmm? What happened to seeing your brothers and your parents and Tinker Bell again?”

Wendy glares at him, and starts to shake him off of her, but he shakes his head. “Oh, no you don’t,” he says, and before either of them can think – breathe – do much of anything useful, really – his mouth is on hers, and he is sucking out the air from his lungs, with his teeth, with his tongue, with his lips as his fingers dig harshly into her sides.

He only pulls away, leaving her gasping, to bring them some place else.

That’s how it starts – the panic, in his eyes. The brief thing she’d seen – the not quite human emotion that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

She doesn’t know what it is. Neither of them do. They pretend, for a short while – until late April – that their norm is her running, him chasing – him, eventually – catching – and it all ends with bruises or kisses or one of the other.

Whatever human thing she saw in him, that day – he’s been trying to make her heart forget it. It hasn’t worked, and, she hasn’t really liked him, by any means – but that’s okay, because it wouldn’t be any fun if she did – if she just gave up, and became some boring toy.

Thoughts have been churning in their minds, in private, behind closed eyes, lips pressed together, and fingers digging into the other’s skin in the dead of night. With a scratch on her face, or a bite mark on the inside of her thigh – it doesn’t matter. They’ve both been thinking – and she is the first to speak her thoughts, face to face.

“You’re not how they say,” she starts off, “you’re not like the tales I head – you’re not the Peter Pan I know.”

(In another life, it would be the son of a savior who would say that to him, but that is not this life, this reality.)

And that’s how it starts. Once she starts, she keeps going, even when he tells her to shut up – even when he threatens to slit her throat and rip the bones from her body while she still clutches at the gash in her throat – but he doesn’t, because she’s right.

Something has changed, since February. She doesn’t quite know how, and if he does, he doesn’t share it.

He grows angry – tells her she’s romanticizing – because he is a demon (like she could forget), something she’s been warned against since she was a little girl.

He leaves, in a fit of anger – of rage – leaves for a while.

When she runs, though – before the first light of May can touch the skies above her – he appears out of nowhere. But something isn’t how it usually is.

He doesn’t bite her.

Doesn’t kiss her.

Doesn’t shove her against the wall or to the ground.

Instead, pulls her to him, wrists held tight in a familiar bruising grasp.

“I’m going to let you go,” he says. His eyes are wide – desperate – and he looks conflicted, like he’s not quite sure what he’s saying, and for a moment, she wonders if he’s dangling something in front of her – so she can make a grab for it – so he can snatch it away – and start another one of his games – but when he repeats himself, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh of her wrist, Wendy doesn’t know what to say.

Something’s changed – something has shifted, inside of him.

But he leaves her outside Storybrooke before she can see what’s happened to him – to his heart – shining in his eyes.  
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

What snaps Wendy back to reality is her tripping over her own two feet. She falls to ground, groans, and tries not to cry. She’s picking herself up from the ground, gingerly, slowly – wondering if this all been a nightmare – wondering if her body and mind and heart will ever stop hurting, below the thick layer of steel she’s had to build in the last several months when she hears her name being called.

Wendy feels a bit better now, after allowing herself to remember – remember everything. Turning, she sees Tink rolling towards her.

Wendy goes to her, and forces the woman in the wheelchair to stop rolling forward.

“You – I thought you were gone,” Tink says, breathing hard, “and for that, you get to push me all the way back to town.”

Wendy’s brow furrows. She still doesn’t want to talk to anyone – doesn’t know if she can answer any questions anyone might have. But she gives her a tight smile, a nod, and she’s pushing her, slowly, back to town, before she can think otherwise – because it’s Tinker Bell.

“So, do you want to tell me what happened, or do I have to bother you to death by getting Killian to do one-hand jokes for the rest of our days?”

Wendy smiles, despite her heavy mood – heavy heart in her chest, and nods. She’s not ready, not really – but it’s Tink who’s asking, anyway. So she starts, from the very, very beginning.

By the time they get back into town, Tink has declared that, if she sees the fucker again, she’ll try her best not to kill him.

Because Wendy changed him, somehow. Wendy changed the devil. She does hope he appears again, some time, even if it’s just so she can give him a lecture about how adult feelings and emotion works – because if he actually did – er, care – about Wendy, then of course, he had to be rid of her – couldn’t be fucking near her

It made sense, but she doesn’t tell Wendy this. Instead, she sees if the day that Peter Pan comes back to Storybrooke comes around.)

(It doesn’t. Pan never comes back.)


End file.
